Building Strong, Well-Rounded Neighborhood Schools

Real Oversight 

Over the past two years, students, parents, and educators have suffered the consequences of the Council’s hands-off approach to oversight. Communication from DCPS has consistently been terrible. Teachers and students have been forced to constantly adjust to sudden policy changes — many announced without much consultation or discussion with stakeholders.

In both this and the previous academic year, DCPS botched the return to in-person learning, in large part because the plans were poorly thought out, drafted in a vacuum behind closed doors, and absurd. There isn’t any excuse for why every school wasn’t fully equipped for outdoor learning in August 2020, let alone 2021. It is deeply shameful that DCPS made little real effort to facilitate outdoor learning when countless private schools in Ward 3 safely continued in-person instruction in tents while DCPS kids learned math and reading on Zoom and Teams. Creative thinking and productive engagement with stakeholders, might have mitigated the impact of school closures on kids and families while recognizing teachers’ health concerns and labor rights. Instead, DCPS proved itself to be insular and anything but agile; its sheer lethargy in the face of an urgent pandemic, despite months of opportunity for planning and preparation, pitted working parents, gender equity and essential educational workers against each other unnecessarily. The Council looked the other way — not wanting to come near the political football that was COVID and schools — and no one was held accountable.

As your Councilmember, I will work to:

• Restore the Council’s Education Committee.  Inexplicably, Chairman Mendelson chose to dismantle the Council’s Education Committee during the pandemic.  This move would supposedly not impact the Council’s oversight capacity, but that proved to be wishful thinking.  The Council must reestablish an Education Committee and commit to vigorous oversight. DCPS’s lack of transparency, poor communication, and lackluster planning around the return to in-person learning was truly astounding.  Heading into the third academic year impacted by COVID, how is it possible that so many schools lacked the facilities and resources to engage in outdoor learning? In the fall of 2020, parents and educators called on DCPS to develop an outdoor learning plan so that kids could return in-person, but DCPS never appeared to seriously consider the idea at scale.  It is embarrassing that, given the missteps of the past 2 years, the Council has effectively abdicated its responsibility to engage in rigorous oversight of DC schools.

• Maintain Mayoral Control while Ensuring that Decisions are Subjected to Rigorous Oversight. It should go without saying that strong oversight is essential in a mayoral control system.  We need to do much, much better on that front.  What we do not need to do is revisit the District’s current system of mayoral control of schools.  The change to mayoral control has been a success.  Significant progress has been made in improving DC schools.  Moreover, given the importance of education, it makes much more sense to place ultimate responsibility for setting education policy and managing schools with the District’s chief executive, its most high-profile and best-known elected official.  Mayoral control means that the debate over education policy plays a central role in mayoral elections, which tend to have the most qualified candidates, the most professional campaigns, and be the subject of the most attention from the media and voters.  Put differently, it is easy for voters to know exactly whom they should blame if they are dissatisfied and want a new approach.  In contrast, candidates for state board of education are often inexperienced, first-time candidates with limited experience managing large organizations. Their campaigns are entitled to less funding under the Fair Election system and their positions, by and large, are not heavily scrutinized—except by the warring interest group factions that dominate education policy debates.  Once elected, the mayor operates under a media microscope, while SBOE members remain unknown by voters and under covered by the press. 

• Establish an independent oversight agency to audit and report school data transparently. Strong, independent oversight is essential in a mayoral control system. The Council needs access to data that is compiled and published independently from the executive in order to exercise its oversight responsibilities effectively. While I do not believe that OSSE should be that agency, given the role it plays in our system making OSEE independent would weaken mayoral control without any clear benefits, I would favor creating a new agency, either answerable to the Council or truly independent, to audit and report on academic performance and other issues. (This role could be filled by the DC Auditor, but I think it would be preferable to create an education-focused agency staffed by education experts and supported by sufficient resources.)

• Explore ways to give SBOE greater oversight power without compromising mayoral control. The SBOE can and should play a bigger role in helping the Council hold school leaders accountable. There are ways to empower the SBOE without compromising the ability of the Executive to establish and implement school policies.

• Require DCPS to Produce and Execute a Real Plan for Reducing Teacher Attrition.  The retention crisis is not a new phenomenon.  According to pre-pandemic estimates from the State Board of Education, half of DCPS teachers leave within three years. By year five, that number climbs to 70%.   Some of these teachers had struggled in the classroom and received IMPACT ratings of Ineffective or Minimally Effective, but 57% of the nearly 4,000 teachers that left between 2013 and 2020 were rated Effective or Highly Effective.  Even in Ward 3, which has lower teacher attrition rates, one in five teachers cycle out of DCPS within three years. 

Schools staffed by experienced teachers have better results, both for students and for novice teachers working alongside veteran educators.  DCPS needs to come up with real solutions and deliver, just as they expect teachers and students to do each year.  

• Require OSSE to publish detailed statistics regarding teacher and principal turnover at all DC schools.  These statistics must be reported to the Council, school leaders, LSATs, and be prominently included on the DC School Report Card site and other platforms.  Whether a school is retaining or not retaining its educators is an essential thing for policymakers and parents to know.  Excessive turnover is a sign that something is not working, full stop.  

• Set aside “Retention Crisis Funds” for schools with excessive turnover. Excessive turnover is a sign that a school is in trouble.  Typically, turnover is highest at schools that already have the biggest challenges.  The scrutiny and intense pressure to turn things around and deliver results can easily destroy morale and trigger a counterproductive rush for the exits, by both novice and experienced teachers.  Retention Crisis Funds, designed to supplement and not replace other dollars, would be reserved specifically for evidence-based initiatives to boost retention.  Teacher turnover rates are driven by multiple factors and some issues may be more relevant at certain campuses—a negative, unsupportive relationship with administrators, for instance, will be a factor at some but not all schools. Thus, a first step would be to conduct a school-specific root cause analysis that can inform the specific interventions. 

• Establish clear and high expectations for school culture and environment and hold school leaders accountable when schools fall short.  Creating a loving environment where children’s needs are met starts at the top.  When teachers are supported, their cups are full enough to best support students.  School leaders have an obligation to not just focus on test scores and academic achievement and that cannot be the primary metric by which we evaluate their performance.  

• Establish zero tolerance for developmentally inappropriate discipline practices. Schools should be safe and loving spaces. Expert after expert states definitively that a punitive discipline model is counterproductive and affirmatively harmful. And yet, we see plenty of examples of schools doing just that. Ending these practices is essential if we want to fully disentangle our schools from the criminal justice system.

• Ensure that our schools are meeting their obligations to students with special needs, English language learners, and at-risk students. A re-formed Education Committee, in partnership with SBOE and other players, must actively investigate to ensure that the needs of students with special needs are being met, that budgetary requests are sufficient, and that funds are being spent appropriately. This kind of oversight must extend way beyond simply holding hearings, although that is important. Councilmembers must engage teachers, parents, students, and other stakeholders where they are. That means visiting schools over and over. Holding conversations in the community and meeting with organizations that are close to these issues. With respect to students with special needs, we must ensure that individual schools have sufficient funding and resources to serve the full range of student needs.

• Demand that new policies and initiatives be developed through an open process and good faith engagement with principals, teachers, and parents, and not behind closed doors in a conference room. New policies and requirements should not be rushed without time for consultation with all stakeholders, analysis by experts, and some space for introspection. I am not opposed to “education reform” by any means — we must do more to improve outcomes for all students in all schools. But I am extremely wary of top-down plans dreamed up by adults sitting around a conference table, especially when it seems like those plans were hatched without much consultation with classroom teachers or principals. I can recall many examples of laudable initiatives that had the right goals and that could have greatly improved outcomes for my students but largely fell flat because of design flaws that could have been easily avoided by thorough real engagement with teachers and principals.

• Develop Better Metrics for Assessing Student Mental Health and School Culture.  For parents, understanding a school’s culture and learning climate is just as essential as knowing the percentage of students reading on grade level.  It can be difficult, however, for parents to assess whether a school has a punitive discipline culture or whether there is a toxic relationship between educators and administrators.  Suspension rates and teacher retention figures give parents a sense, but while very important, these are just two data points reflecting a school’s culture.